Leopold Borstinski's Blog, page 22

Grab yourself some noir fiction

To celebrate Noirvember, a month-long event I must admit I’d never heard of, we have a bunch of thrilling giveaways for you to grab, called All Noir. They are all free for the month, but I’d recommend you pop over to the website right away and download what you want.

Fill your boots.

Penny Pitstop – an update

Just a quick note about the early days of the launch of the Death and Life of Penny Pitstop which came out earlier this week. Early reviews have been 4 and 5 star – thank you for those who have read and typed – and the early bird discount ends October 26. Or Saturday as it is sometimes known. On October 27, the price goes up from £/$0.99 and up to £/$4.99.

[Start of sales pitch]So if you want to pick up a bargain with an 80% discount then head off to your favourite ebook platform and grab a copy while it is cheap. [End of sales pitch]

Mob Story For You

Today, it is my pleasure to let you know about a mob tale from Frank Lucianus. The book is called Sins of the Son and is the first of a fine Italian Mafia series. The blurb should help you decide about the story…

Will New York’s Italian Mafia finally unite after years of bloodshed because of a secret love affair?

The New York Mafia has been around for decades, and one family has been ruling the empire with an iron first. But wait. There’s an upstart waiting in the wings, and others are waiting to claw their way in, now leveling the playing field.

The prize to be had in the upcoming battle is control of the infamous New York Harbor. The warriors? Francesco Giuliani, the son, hitman & enforcer for the first family and Jessica Lombardi, her family’s lawyer who has recently has learned the business from her father and brother but still has raw tendencies.

New York, already on alert when two leading crime bosses were found whacked, now is flooded with the NYPD, ATF & FBI, all chasing after the mobster culprits and associates.

Vowing to end organized crime-once and for all!

When Francesco and Jessica finally meet, the sparks fly, but will that be enough to stop their crime families from tearing apart not just New York, but their profound love?

Fill your boots.

Back to Sex (No Sex)

Thank you to those who responded to my comments last week – I truly do appreciate hearing from you. When I mentioned I was going to return to The Heist and exorcise the sex from the novel, I caused a bit of a stir and I thought I’d follow up this week to clarify what I meant, my motivation for making changes and what that means for any future books I publish.

Some of you were concerned I was caving into the “Disneyfication” of our world, which meant you thought I was cleaning up my act, perhaps bowing to some unmentioned pressure and that this meant there might even be happy ever after tales flowing from my fingertips in the future. Others applauded my decision as they felt I was delivering against the crime fiction promise to describe crimes in intense detail but not to include intimate scenes because they are not part of the mainstream crime fiction genre.

Let me try to expand on my reasons – and forgive me if you find this talk of sex all a bit unnecessary and unwanted. I write because I love doing it but I publish because I want people to read my stories. The more people who read my novels, the better I feel as an indy publisher. My genre is crime fiction – if you read my posts from the start of this year then you will see the tragic consequences of my foray into detective fiction. Not a pretty sight.

As a result, I want as many people to read my crime fiction as possible and that means I listen to my customers, those who read my books. Enough feedback from The Heist has come in for me to know two things. First, the original story as published was too confusing and there was too much perceived repetition across the multiple viewpoint scenes. So I removed them. Second, the amount of sex in the book turns some readers off. Now, up until now I have told myself that the reader learns much about each character within these scenes. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think it matters. What is important to me is that people get to the end of the book having enjoyed the ride and then want to read more of my work. If that means taking out some scenes and replacing them with something else (or nothing) then that is a price I am more than willing to pay.

For the record, this is not going to have a huge impact on my future output. So The Death and Life of Penny Pitstop, which is out on October 21, is filled to the brim with sex and financial crime but The Bowery Slugger, out on November 10, has no sex at all. I shall also try to be clearer in the blurbs when the content is steamy.

Let me know your thoughts. Do you mind if there are explicit sex scenes in my writing? Is it something you like or hate? Do you not care either way and just wish I’d hurry up and finish my next book? Whatever, do tell me.

Book Launch down the barrel of a gun…

Here’s a heads up about a new launch from an author friend of mine, Rachael Tamayo: get your hands on her new release on October 19, called Break My Bones. As ever, the blurb says it all.

Sticks and stones do break bones, and words will surely hurt you.

Staring down the barrel of a loaded 9mm is a wake-up call, especially when it’s your husband’s finger on the trigger. Brooklyn James’s only thought is to take her baby and run. It’s better to end up on the streets than suffer one more day beneath her husband’s hand.

Finally back on her feet, Brooklyn is stronger, better prepared, and determined not to run. That is until she gets the call that her husband has been released from prison after serving his three years for DWI.

Cain James has his wife on his mind, always. With his friend Donovan at his side, anything is possible. He can find her, bring her home, make her love him again. While Cain has serious anger issues, Donovan is much worse. Cain can’t control his friend’s sick, twisted mind and even sicker actions.

Donovan has Cain’s best interest at heart, and he’ll do whatever it takes to help Cain bring his wife home—including murder. After his time in prison, Cain doesn’t want to hurt his wife again and becomes a man torn—divided between the darkness inside him, his twisted love, and his lifelong protector, Donovan.

As Cain tries to convince his wife that he’s changed, he watches the bodies hit the floor one by one at the hands of his sidekick. Enraged by his estranged wife’s new love and conflicted by his own anger and need to protect his family, Cain unravels.

He can’t live without her, and he won’t let her live without him.

Be one of the first to grab this story. Fill your boots.

Mystery fresh for you…

I’d like to introduce you to an author chum of mine, Donna B McNicol and her Not a Whisper. It’s a police procedural and I’ll let the blurb tell you more:

When a retreat becomes a nightmare…

When Cherie Marshall catches her fiancé and best friend in a compromising position, she cancels her upcoming wedding and jumps at the chance to escape to quiet Klondike, Pennsylvania to care for her elderly aunt. She thought her biggest issue would be adapting to life in the middle of a National Forest, so very different from her upbringing in the deserts of Arizona.

But that was before she met State Trooper Fire Marshall Jamison “Jazz” Maddox at the scene of a mysterious fire. As they both become acquainted with the close-knit Klondike residents, things get complicated as Cherie and Jazz find themselves in the middle of a local crime wave where arson, kidnapping, embezzlement and a decades-old murder are just the tip of the iceberg.

No sex please, we’re readers

I’ve just come back from watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious at a rep cinema. It has just been reissued in a freshly restored print so I heartily recommend it for anyone who enjoys old-fashioned thrillers.

This lovely film got me thinking about the sexual tension onscreen. The magic of the not-quite-kissing between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman is a marvel to behold. And made me reflect on the sexual relations portrayed in The Heist. With the blog tour for The Lagotti Family boxset rolling along, I have been considering some responses which have commented on the sex in book 1. To summarise (a minority of) the reviews, some would prefer the explicit sex wasn’t in the book at all.

My aim with the novel was to reflect the tedium of waiting for a job to happen and I figured that the lowlife scum I was describing would hit the sack to hide their boredom from themselves. Seems as though I might have gone too far. So once I have finished working on my current novel, The Eastside Hustler, my plan is to return to the Heist re-edit it and excise the excesses of sexual description. Having figured out quite how I shall do that and still reflect the character arcs shown in the current version, but that’s my problem.

Just thought I’d let you know what’s flashing through my head. I do love a bit of Hitchcock..

Psychological thriller available any day now

I’d like to introduce you to a fresh voice with a fab book out on October 8:  Bathed in the Blood has been written by Kyra Quinn. I’ll let the blurb do the work:

Some secrets refuse to stay buried…

On the surface, Nora Tripp’s life resembles a fairytale. A stay-at-home mother married to her high school sweetheart, most of the women in her rural Georgian town envy her fortune.

But deadly secrets lurk beneath the calm surface. When an innocent mistake leads to her daughter’s disappearance, Nora vows to bring her child home by any means necessary. But the deeper she digs, the more Nora realizes she can’t trust anyone in her life. Not even herself.

Can Nora work with her demons to find her daughter, or will her dark past unravel her future?

What’s in a name?

I was chatting to a couple of colleagues earlier today, talking about where our last names came from and one of them explained that her grandfather’s grandfather had left Poland to escape the troubles of Eastern Europe and headed for America.

Unfortunately, the boat stopped off in London, he got off and that ended his journey to the USA. As she related the tale, I was immediately reminded of Alex Cohen in The Bowery Slugger (cheesy connection, I know) and I shared his story with her. I mention this because it is fresh in mind, but also because my colleague’s response was really interesting: she was pleased her ancestor had made a basic mistake of geography otherwise she would not exist.

Every breath we take creates an infinite set of possibilities and shuts down a different infinity of nothingness. A love an existential moment in the morning…

Don’t be nervous about Pure Angst

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to an author friend of mine, Stephen Scarcliffe and his novel, Pure Angst. The blurb says it all…

As bad blood threatens the old order, a restless new generation rise from their fathers’ shadows, ready to stamp their own identity on the city streets…

Billy “Curtains” Wright overcomes a dysfunctional home life by winning the respect of the local Muirhouse gang, before rising to a key position within Edinburgh’s ecstasy scene. After falling for Lyndsay, a privileged girl from the other side of the tracks, his underworld ambitions are called into question. He accepts a contract to kill a dangerous rival before finding more than he bargained for, forcing him to confront his brutal childhood and the father he wants gone.

George “The Bull” Donaldson was the hardest in the playground, then the streets of Muirhouse. Now he’s a debt collector for his heroin kingpin father. After being taught a cruel lesson, he partners up with best pal Billy, but when family tensions erupt tough choices have to be made.

After being dragged into the middle of a feud between the uncle who mentored him and the father who just walked free from jail, Sean “Preemo” Donaldson is forced to choose a side. A letter from his estranged mother reopens old wounds and he contemplates the unthinkable.

As each man arrives at his own perilous crossroads, what path will he take?

Pure Angst is a gritty crime fiction novel set within 80s and 90s gangland Edinburgh, and one of its roughest housing estates. It charts the changing face of the drug scene from a heroin and AIDS epidemic to the explosion of MDMA and rave culture…